According to the What Am I thread, GMC built these trucks for Greyhound (the badges on the hoods read “General Motors Truck”) on the T26 chassis using unique sheetmetal. Captions on the photos noted that the trailer coaches were the only motorized transport allowed on the grounds of the fair, and that they carried more than 20 million attendees throughout that time.

So what happened to those 60 after the fair? Nobody seems to know, though one possibility is that they were sold off and repurposed as delivery trucks, as we see from this shot of a Hydrox ice cream truck from a subsequent What Am I thread. Then again, converting a tractor into a long-wheelbase delivery van is no simple task, so the ice cream truck could have nothing directly to do with the Greyhound trailer coaches. Anybody out there know the whole story?

UPDATE (9.August 2011): Jeff Lakaszcyck wrote in to inform us that the trailer coaches apparently didn’t become ice cream trucks. Rather, Bowen Bus Lines of Texas bought them after the fair and put them out to pasture, where LIFE photographed them in 1939. After that, they apparently went for scrap during the war.

UPDATE (6.September 2011): Geoff Hacker sent over a picture of one of the transporter toys that several of you in the comments have mentioned.

As we discovered last year, Hudson conceived a nifty publicity stunt in 1934 to get the Terraplane some attention. The Hudson-Terraplane Ruggedness Run selected 20 different 1934 Terraplane owners from across the country to participate in two-week tours in cars lettered up as billboards by Hudson. It’s a sort of viral marketing (or possibly astroturfing) from an era long before the terms were ever invented. Each car and driver had its own region of the country, and Hudson ran a parallel contest for the general public to choose the names for each car.

Thus, we’ve already seen the Colonial Cruiser, which toured New England; the Cascade Express for Washington state; the Golden Gate Flyer for California; and the Gulf States Flyer in Florida. Add to that list the car in the photo above, which we found at the University of Illinois’s photo archive via Industrial Artifacts Review. Chicago policeman Henry Sheldon won the contest to name the Century of Progress Ranger, which he christened at the 1933-1934 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. No mention was made of the Century of Progress Ranger’s route, but we presume it would have included Illinois, Wisconsin, and possibly Indiana.